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Kosova and the right of oppressed nations to self-determination

By
Michael Karadjis

This
is the second in a series of articles looking at aspects of the issue of the
recently announced semi-independence of Kosova [Kosovo], which has produced
markedly different reactions among left-wing and socialist movements around the
world. (Click here for the first article in the series.)

This
article will tackle the general question of the right to national self-determination,
and why Kosova’s situation fully accords with this right long supported by the revolutionary
left. While much more will be said of the role of imperialism and other factors
in the following parts – including imperialism’s role precisely in limiting Kosovar self-determination –
understanding this aspect is primary to developing an overall position.

***

Support
of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination is a long-held principle for
Marxists. Lenin in particular elaborated a great deal on this issue, and his
writings remain of great relevance today.

Lenin stresses that even abolishing national
oppression can only become reality “with the establishment of full democracy in
all spheres, including the delineation of
state frontiers in accordance with the `sympathies' of the
population, including complete freedom to secede.” This is not in order to
create small states, but on the contrary, only this can, dialectically, “serve
as a basis for developing the practical elimination of even the slightest
national friction and the least national mistrust, for an accelerated drawing
together and fusion of nations …”[1]

Thus this is all the more important when talking
about capitalist states, the relationships between which are commonly
characterised by national oppression. Lenin considered it self-evident that
peoples will only revolt for independence if the conditions of national
oppression are intolerable:

“From their daily experience the masses know
perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties and the advantages
of a big market and a big state. They will, therefore, resort to secession only
when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely
intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse.”[2]

Moreover, for all practical purposes, to oppose the
right of self-determination means to support the right of the stronger nation
to forcibly suppress their struggles:

“... in the capitalist state, repudiation of the
right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means
nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police
methods of administration, to the detriment of democratic methods...”[3]

Far
from being a concession to the narrow bourgeois aspect of the nationalism of
the oppressed, it is only the right to full secession that is capable of undermining
such nationalism:

“The
right to self-determination and secession seems to ‘concede’ the maximum to
nationalism” but “in reality, the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and the minimum of
nationalism” because it helps promote the internationalist “class solidarity”
of the workers of oppressor and oppressed nations.”[4]

But
while many leftists accept this right in theory, some claim it is limited to
struggles by oppressed peoples against imperialism, or at least that it depends
on whether a particular struggle for national self-determination strengthens or
weakens imperialist interests.

But
this wasn’t how Lenin viewed it at all. When he supported Norway’s independence from Sweden it had no connection to
either alleged condition. Even more starkly, recognising that the balance of
class forces was against the working class in the Baltic states in 1918, Lenin chose not
to send the Red Army of the young Soviet republic in to help the Communist
forces in these republics, where right-wing regimes came to power. The
Bolsheviks did not believe socialism could be imposed on the barrel of a gun;
only the working classes in those states could carry out this task.

In the 1930s, following the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the
revival of Great Russian oppression by the Stalinist regime, the issue again
arose of the position revolutionaries would take towards movements for
self-determination in the oppressed non-Russian republics. Trotsky’s view was
clear. Calling for a “united, free, and independent workers’ and peasants’
Ukraine,” Trotsky pointed out that it was precisely the denial of the right to
national self-determination of the Ukraine by a “Communist” regime that has shifted the
Ukrainian national movement to “the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques,” who
had won over a section of the Ukrainian working class. On the other hand, an
independent Ukraine would become “if only by
virtue of its own interests, a mighty southwestern bulwark of the USSR.”[5]

When
one sees Kosovar Albanians wildly waving US flags next to their own
Albanian flag – which, ironically enough, imperialism has forced them to
abandon – one is reminded of this quote from Trotsky: it was not the exercise
of Kosovar self-determination, but precisely the denial of it to the Kosovars,
that allowed US imperialism – very belatedly – to pose as their champion when
it found it opportune, leading to this marked pro-imperialist shift in the
consciousness of Kosovar Albanians.

There is a basic “common sense” aspect to
this right: given that people will only risk a struggle for independence when
they find conditions unbearable, any opposition to their struggle from leftists
will not only change nothing about their struggle, but alienate the left from
this entire oppressed nation. Every claim
that a particular national struggle may happen to coincide with some
reactionary or imperialist interest can be countered by the simple fact that it
was the oppression in the first place that produced this result. The masses of
this oppressed nation will not move on to a more progressive, let alone
socialist, consciousness, until they have achieved their right to run their own
state and learn in practice that their “own” bourgeoisie is also their enemy.

The roots of Albanian oppression and resistance

In the 19th century, the Greek,
Serbian and Bulgarian people had waged successful liberation struggles against
the Ottoman empire and set up their own independent capitalist states – as
today’s critics of Kosova might say, they carried out “illegal secession” that
“violated Ottoman sovereignty.” However, a strip of the Balkans, covering the
Albanian, Macedonian and Thracian regions, with a wide ethnic mixture, remained
under Ottoman rule.

In 1912, the Albanian peoples rose in
revolt against Ottoman rule. Aiming to grab as much territory from the
retreating empire as possible, before the Albanians or other local peoples
could set up their own states, the three independent Balkan states launched the
two Balkan wars of 1912-13 to carve up remaining Ottoman territory.
Approximately half of the Albanian ethnic territory fell to the Serbian
monarchy, including Kosova, a large section of Serbian-conquered part of
Macedonia (itself divided into three), the Presevo Valley in southeast Serbia
and parts of Montenegro. The other half was rescued for a rump Albanian state
by Austrian diplomacy.

This partition of the Albanian and
Macedonian nations and the other borders drawn in blood were officially
recognised by the imperialist powers at the London Conference of 1913. Serbia
was a key ally of the British-French-Russian imperialist bloc in its impending
clash with its German-Austrian rivals. This imperialist
consecration of the division of the Albanian nation is at the heart of the
conflict which has raged throughout the century.

The Kosovar Albanians furiously resisted
the occupation. The Serbian monarchy was pitiless in its suppression --
according to the investigators of the Carnegie Commission, referring to the period
immediately after the Balkan wars:

“Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations
massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every
kind -- such were the means which were employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin
soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of
regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.”[6]

Another account was given by Lazer Mjeda, the Catholic Archbishop of Skopje,
who noted that in Ferizaj only three Muslim Albanians over the age of 15 had been
left alive, and that the population of Gjakova had been massacred despite
surrendering. He described the scene in Prizren, which had also surrendered
peacefully in the hope of being spared what was happening elsewhere in Kosova:

“The city seems like the Kingdom of Death. They knock on the doors of the
Albanian houses, take away the men and shoot them immediately. In a few days
the number of men killed reached 400. As for plunder, looting and rape, all
that goes without saying; henceforth, the order of the day is: everything is
permitted against Albanians, not only permitted, but willed and commanded.”[7]

Serbian Marxist Dimitrije Tucovic witnessed “barbaric
crematoria in which hundreds of women and children are burnt alive” and claimed
the clergy were urging the troops on to take revenge for the Battle of Kosovo
Polje in 1389, when the then Serbian empire was defeated by the Ottoman empire
in Kosova. “The historic task of Serbia,” he wrote “is a big lie.”[8]“For as long as the Serbs will not understand and realize
that they are on foreign lands and territory, they will never be in peace or
have good neighbor relations with Albanians,” Tucovic wrote. “Unlimited
enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the
Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous
result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the
greatest interests in the Balkans.”[9]

Tucovic was leader of the left faction of the Serbian
Social-democratic Party which, together with Lenin’s Russian Bolsheviks, wereamong the only social-democratic
parties to remain internationalist during WWI and to deny war credits to their “own”
bourgeoisie. What he writes above about 1912-13 may just as well have been
written about the 1980s and 1990s.

Meanwhile, living under the
Austro-Hungarian yoke were other south Slavs, the Slovenes, Croats and now
Bosnians. In their own freedom struggle, the idea had emerged of the unity of
all South Slavs, in a “Yugoslav” state. In practice this meant that these
Hapsburg-ruled Slavic nations would unite with the expanded Serbian monarchy. This
“Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” was proclaimed in 1918 under
Anglo-French auspices, but from the start was a classic prison-house of nations,
completely dominated by the Serbian bourgeoisie.

The worst excesses occurred in Kosova,
where the largely Muslim Albanian majority were not Slavic at all, and lived in
a land that Serb nationalists declared the cradle of their nation due to the
presence of a large number of medieval Orthodox churches, and the famous battle
against the Ottomans back in 1389.

Modern Serb nationalists claim that “Kosova
has always been Serbia,” but according to one reading of Turkish statistics of
1911, of the 912,902 residents of the Vilayet of Kosova, 743,040 (80.5 percent)
were Albanians and 106,209 (11.5 percent) were Serbs.[10]
According to a more generous reading, Ottoman statistics put Orthodox Serbs at
21 percent of the population, still an absolute minority, and Austrian
statistics in 1903 put it as high as 25 percent, the maximum claimed by any
source.[11]
The discrepancy in claimed Ottoman figures is almost certainly due to the fact
that the Ottomans did not do censuses of ethnic groups, but only of religious
affiliation – ‘Orthodox’ was assumed to be ‘Serb’ by the more generous
researchers, but this would be an incorrect reading. But even according to the
most generous reading, Albanians were the absolute majority.

Between the two World Wars, Albanians were
ruthlessly uprooted: in one example, the entire Albanian population of upper
Drenica (6064 people) were dispossessed of their land in 1938. They were
pressured into leaving for Albania or Turkey -- estimates are of some 70,000
Albanians leaving during this period. However, that was not considered
adequate, so in 1938, Yugoslavia made a deal with Turkey to expel another
40,000 Albanians, as Turkey wanted to use the Muslim Albanians to colonise
eastern Anatolia as an outpost against its own oppressed Kurds and Armenians. A
leading member of the Serbian Academy, Vaso Cubrilovic, put out a memorandum
entitled “The expulsion of the Albanians” in which he claimed that if Hitler
and Stalin could get away with all kinds of slaughter without anyone reacting,
then what would the world care about the expulsion of a few hundred thousand
Albanians?

Some 15,000 Serb families -- representing
some 70,000 people, or about 10 per cent of the total Kosova population -- were
moved in from Serbia proper as colonists and given large properties. Of 400,000
hectares of arable land in Kosova, these colonists were awarded 100,000
hectares. In 1928, Serbian official Djorje Krstic boasted that colonisation had
boosted the percentage of Serbs in Kosova from 24 per cent, which he claimed for
1919, to 38 per cent.[12]
Given that in 1999, the then Serb population of only 10 per cent of Kosova
consisted of only 200,000 people, this gives an idea of how significant this
colonisation was.

Italy invades

Following these 25 years of this prison-hell,
when Mussolini invaded, the Albanians initially welcomed the Italian fascist troops,
like Ukrainians and many others initially welcomed Nazi troops, or like future
Indonesian national hero Sukarno collaborated with the Japanese occupiers. Of
course, there were also Serb collaborators, as there were among all Yugoslav
nations.[13]

The Italian occupiers allowed Kosova to be
reunited with Albania as their puppet state. It is estimated that some 40,000
Serbs were expelled by the Albanian collaborationist regime. Though these were
overwhelmingly the Serb colonists that were driven out, as the war progressed, Albanian
fascists got less discriminating and acted with ruthless brutality towards the
Serb population.

However, a Kosovar Albanian Partisan
movement also appeared, fighting for the right to national self-determination, including
unity with Communist Albania. This was inspired by the program of Josip Broz
Tito’s Communist Partisans, who opposed the unitary Serb-dominated Yugoslavia
of the inter-war years, and advocated instead an equal federation of
Yugoslavia’s nations, based on proletarian internationalist ideals. Yugoslav and
Albanian Communist leaders Tito and Enver Hoxha had aimed for Albania to become
part of this, and for a new socialist federation of all Balkan nations, beyond
a mere Yugoslav federation. As such, there could be no Kosovar republic,
because it would eventually be part of the Albanian republic in the new
federation, alongside the six Yugoslav republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia,
Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro), and perhaps Bulgaria as well.

However, this never came to pass. In the
first major violation of the new impending federal order, Tito had gathered
Serb Partisans together with large numbers of former royalist,
Serbian-chauvinist Cetniks (who came over following two amnesties declared by
Tito in late 1944) and crushed the Kosovar Partisans.

According to Miranda Vickers:

“Perhaps the worst atrocity occurred in
Tivar in Montenegro, where 1,670 Albanians were herded into a tunnel which was
then sealed off so that all were asphyxiated.”[14]

As relations between Yugoslavia and Albania
later deteriorated, Kosova was stuck in the highly unsatisfactory situation of
autonomy inside Serbia.

Kosova’s “autonomy” status signified the
Albanians as a “national minority” rather than a “nation” as their nation-state
was Albania. However, Albanians were the vast majority of the population of
Kosova in 1945, and in sheer numbers, they were bigger than most of the
“nations” of Yugoslavia, and growing. This lack of republican status, combined
with Kosova’s drastically poorer position than all Yugoslav republics, made the
Albanians an unambiguously oppressed nation in the new Yugoslavia.

In the first twenty years, under hard-line
Serb leader Rankovic, this ``autonomy” meant little more than living under
permanent terror.Even the expulsions
continued: in 1953, the pact with Turkey was reactivated, and some 100,000
Albanians were forced out in the program in the 1950s.

Kosovar national movement blossoms

With
the fall of the Rankovic regime in 1966, the Kosovar Albanian national movement
began to blossom, partly under the influence of the 1960s rebellion. Responding
to this, Tito visited Kosova in 1967, and declared a complete reversal of
policy. According to Tito:

“One
cannot talk about equal rights when Serbs are given preference in factories …
and Albanians are rejected even though they have the same and better
qualifications.”[15]

A
new, more internationalist, policy was introduced, which for the first time
brought Kosovar Albanians close to the same level of equality enjoyed by the
six other nations under the Titoist ``Brotherhood and Unity'' policy of the
socialist federation of equal nations. Until then, Albanians had been left out
of this policy largely as a concession to Serbian nationalists, who had always
regarded Titoism and federation as “the destruction of the Serb nation,”
because that nation did not have the absolute power it had had in capitalist Yugoslavia. By denying equality at
least to the “Serb holy land” of Kosova, and giving them many positions in the
repressive apparatus there, Tito had hoped to pacify these reactionary forces.

According
to Clark:

“The
provincial government now gained more autonomy, introduced secondary schooling
in Albanian, accepted Albanian and Turkish alongside Serbo-Croatian as official
languages, and began to administer the ‘ethnic keys’ that were a feature of
Yugoslavia at that time. For the first time, the majority of members of the
League of Communists of Yugoslavia in Kosovo were Albanians.”[16]

Prisoners
were released, the secret police purged, and the media allowed a field day to
expose the crimes of the Rankovic era. In 1970, the University of Pristina, with courses in both
Albanian and Serbo-Croatian, was opened, as was the Rilindja publishing house,
for the first time bringing out many books on Albanian history and culture.
Above all, Kosovar Albanians could now fly the flag of neighbouring Albania as their own flag,
reflecting their actual national consciousness, and the degree to which ‘high
Titoism’ was moving towards internationalism on this issue.

The
new 1974 constitution upgraded Kosova’s status to what is known famously as ``high level autonomy'', under which, while still officially an autonomous
province of Serbia, it was also declared a ``constituent element'' of the
Yugoslav federation itself. Kosova had direct representation in the Yugoslav federal
presidency as an equal to other republics, not via the Serbian republic. Albanians
from Kosova had their turns as president and vice-president, like
representatives from other republics, positions annually rotated among the
eight equal constituent units of the federation. Kosova even had the same right
to veto on the collective presidency as did republics. It had its own supreme
court, its own central bank, its own territorial defence force, all features of
a republic.

Despite
these highly positive changes, Albanians still continually called for full
formal republic status, as recognition of full equality. Leading Albanian
Communist Mehmet Hoxha had asked in 1968, “Why do 370,000 Montenegrins have
their own republic, but 1.2 million Albanians do not even have total autonomy.”[17]
However, now that they did have “total autonomy-plus” after 1974, this
near-republic status, while far from perfect, was the “legal” situation, and
therefore the claim that Kosova was a mere “province” of Serbia, and thus that
is all it can aspire to now, is false. Indeed it is important to understand
that even the element of still being formally a “highly autonomous” province of
Serbia was entirely connected to and conditional upon it also being a direct
part of the Yugoslav federation, so when that federation later collapsed, so
did this entire constitutional set-up that included “autonomy”. Mere
autonomy within Serbia can only be a downgraded status compared to being a
constituent unit of a greater federation, which no longer exists.

The fact that Albanians nevertheless
remained dissatisfied was accentuated by Kosova’s dramatic economic situation,
where unemployment hovered around 50 per cent, two and a half times the Yugoslav
average. Kosova’s proportion of Yugoslav GDP was only one quarter its share of
the population, and its GDP per capita was one quarter that of Serbia, again
revealing its absolutely oppressed state.[18]Albanians likewise were grossly
under-represented in unelected state bodies: with 8 per cent of the Yugoslav
population, they accounted for only 1 per cent of the officers of the Yugoslav
People’s Army, while 67 per cent of officers were Serb or Montenegrin (compared to
their 39 per cent of the population).[19]

From `Brotherhood and Unity' to Serbian national chauvinism

Tito died in 1980, and with him, one
of the key figures dedicated to preserving the delicate ethnic balance that
held the federation together. In 1981, demonstrations at PristinaUniversity were brutally crushed by
the Yugoslav military, with considerable killing. Thousands were arrested. This
was followed by years of repression. Albanians, while only 8 per cent of Yugoslavia’s population, made up 75
per cent of political prisoners in the 1980s.[20]
Between 1981 and 1988, 1000 Albanian teachers were sacked for allegedly not
being committed to the fight against Albanian “nationalism.”[21]

This crackdown demonstrated to the
Kosovars how frail their “high level” autonomy really was. Even though this remained
their official status, this new wave of heavy repression effectively put to an
end the 1968-81 ``honeymoon period'' of Albanians in Yugoslavia. This intensified their
push for republic status, and, amongst a minority, for full independence or
unity with Albania. An array of far-left
underground groups sprung up in the 1980s, supported by Enver Hoxha’s
Stalino-Maoist regime in Albania. It is from these groups
that the core of the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA) arose in the 1990s.[22]

On the other extreme, the Serbian
nationalist intelligentsia in the SerbianAcademy of Arts and Sciences in 1986
released the famous “Memorandum,” attacking the entire post-war Titoist order.
It claimed the “Communist-Croat alliance” represented by Tito had set out to
destroy the Serb nation by imposing an “alien” (federal) Yugoslavia upon them,
and that the division into federal republics divided up the Serb nation. The
Memorandum demanded that the Serbian nation must now re-establish its full
“national and cultural integrity ... irrespective of the republic or province
in which it finds itself.” In particular, Kosova must be crushed, to prevent
the ongoing “genocide” against the local Serbs. This represented the first
naked expression of the new nationalist ideology of the rising Serbian
bourgeoisie, which had grown up under decades of “market socialism,” breaking
through the Titoist/Communist ``Brotherhood and Unity'' ideology that had encrusted
it to date.

The wing of the Serbian bureaucracy
around new leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1987 forged an alliance with this
reactionary national chauvinism, and together spearheaded a countermobilisation
of Kosovar Serbs with the exact opposite aim to the Albanians -- to abolish
Kosova’s autonomy, or reduce it to a meaningless pre-1974 variety. They
believed, correctly, that there was a contradiction between Kosova being
autonomous within Serbia yet having many features
of a republic. In 1986, Vojislav Seselj (today leader of the extreme Chetnik
Serbian Radical Party) demanded this contradiction be fixed, through reduction
of autonomy, because, as he saw it, the contradiction could be interpreted as
Kosova, as a federal unit, having the same right to secession as the republics.

Kosovar Serbs were mobilised on the
pretext that it was their rights under
attack from an “Albanian” administration in Kosova, which would seem odd
considering the massive police repression of everything Albanian from 1981
onwards. The Kosovar Serbs had a very high constitutional position for the
small minority they were. According to Kullashi Muhaludin from PristinaUniversity, “Throughout the
institutions, from the lowest communal level to the highest instances of state
and party, the leading functions were always shared between the two
nationalities. If a school director, for example, was of one nationality, his
deputy would have to be from the other. Furthermore, there existed a system of
rotation which, each time a mandate changed, assured that the replacement would
be from the other nationality … Indeed, the rotation principle favoured the
Serbs, who were always in the minority in the province.”[23]

The reason a considerable percentage
of the Kosovar Serb population was able to be mobilised was that it did indeed
have “grievances” -- like those of white South Africans after the end of
apartheid. High level autonomy, and particularly the PristinaUniversity, had resulted in a
growing percentage of jobs in government and administration being taken by
Albanians. While still not equal to the Albanians’ percentage of the population,
nevertheless, this was a big change given that these jobs had previously been
the preserve of Serbs. This in the context of Kosova having such high
unemployment was a perfect environment for nationalists. The economic flight of
Serbs to greener pastures in northern Serbia and Vojvodina was
interpreted as flight from an alleged campaign of violence by the Albanians.

Like in the US Deep South, the
centrepiece of this propaganda was an alleged campaign by “backward, Muslim”
Albanians to rape Serb women. Official statistics, however, showed that rape
was at a lower level in Albania than in more advanced Serbia and Slovenia, and the overwhelming
majority of victims were Albanian women. Statistics also showed only one murder
of a Serb by an Albanian in the period 1982 to 1987, over a land dispute,
following which the culprit was executed. More significant was the change of
law by Serbian authorities which made the ethnic origins of the accused in rape
cases a legally relevant factor.[24]

This campaign was supplemented by
the racist conspiracy theory that the larger families which poorer Albanians had
was a deliberate strategy to outbreed Serbs. The Albanian proportion of the
population in Kosova continued to increase, from 70-75 per cent, to over 80
per cent in 1980 and some 90 per cent by 1999. This occurred for the same reasons
as Lebanese Muslims, Irish Catholics and Palestinians continued to increase in
population all century, much to the chagrin of colonial powers and chauvinists
among Lebanese Christians, Irish Protestants and Israelis, who wanted to
maintain sectarian states: poor people have lots more babies, while better-off
people have less.

In addition, the Kosovar Serbs, like the Bosnian Serbs and
Croats, had a place to go to get out of the miserable poverty of Kosova, the ``Third World'' of Yugoslavia (and out of slightly less miserable Bosnia): to north
Serbia, Vojvodina (or Croatia), whereas the Kosovar Albanians (and Bosnian
Muslims) did not, further entrenching their majority in the province.

Milosevic counter-revolution

In 1988, Milosevic, who had purged
the Serbian League of Communists of its internationalist wing and launched an
IMF-backed neo-liberalisation of the economy, proposed constitutional changes
abolishing Kosova’s high level autonomy. As the Kosova assembly opposed this,
Milosevic forced the resignation of veteran Kosovar leader and Tito-protégé
Adem Vllasi. The heroic Kosovar miners led the last major working class
resistance to the Milosevic counterrevolution.

The irony of many Western
leftists seeing the Milosevic regime as the continuation of “socialist” Yugoslavia opposed to “pro-Western
secessionists” is exposed most clearly in these events. As Milosevic sought to
destroy the Yugoslav constitution, with its fine balance between the various
nations, mobilising under reactionary Chetnik and Serbian Orthodox slogans, the
Kosovar miners led a movement to defend the Yugoslav constitution in late 1988
and early 1989. In their gigantic march from the ‘Trepca’ mines near Mitrovica
in the north to Pristina in November 1988, the miners chanted “Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia,” bearing portraits of
Tito and red flags. They were not calling for Kosovar independence, but warned
that the violent crushing of the Kosovar people would lead to the bloody
collapse of Yugoslavia.

Three hated officials, who had no
popular mandate, were put into the Kosova assembly by Milosevic. In February, a
general strike erupted throughout Kosova. A thousand miners went on hunger
strike underground for eight days, but were tricked into coming up with the pretence
that there demands would be met. The strongly Western-backed federal prime
minister, Ante Markovic, sent federal troops into Kosova, not to support the
constitutional demands of the Kosovar working class, but to suppress them on
behalf of Milosevic, in outright violation of the constitution, effectively
putting an end to Yugoslavia.

A state of emergency
was declared, and 24 Albanians shot dead by the occupation forces. Some 2000
Albanian workers were hauled before the courts, including former leaders of the
assembly. The assembly was surrounded by tanks and helicopters and under this
somewhat direct threat, agreed to pass the constitutional changes and vote
itself out of existence. The next day, Markovic congratulated Milosevic on this
destruction of the federal order.[25]

Kosovar working-class resistance
continued throughout 1989 and 1990. In January and February 1990 a further 32
Kosovar demonstrators were killed. In July, Serbia abolished what was left
of Kosova’s autonomy as it adopted a new constitution, reducing Kosova (and
Vojvodina) to just any other administrative district of Serbia. Locked out of
the Kosova assembly, the majority of legally elected Albanian delegates voted
on an act of self-determination for Kosova. Serbia formerly dissolved the
assembly. On September 7, Kosovar delgates met and declared the Republic of Kosova as a “democratic state
of the Albanian people and of members of other nations and national minorities
who are its citizens: Serbs, Muslims, Montenegrins, Croats, Turks, Romanies and
others living in Kosova.”[26]
In 1991, Kosovars held a referendum, in which 99 per cent voted for
independence.

As the constitutional changes were
forced through against the will of the Kosova assembly, it was an open attack
on the federal constitution. Milosevic stooges were put in charge of the
fictional “assembly” that was maintained as window dressing -- the first major
step in transforming federal Yugoslavia into a unitary
Serb-dominated state. Despite abolition of the provinces’ autonomy, the new hand-picked
“representatives” of Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro maintained federal
representation, meaning four federal units had essentially become one.
Milosevic now had four of the eight votes on the Federal Presidency, meaning an
effective control of Yugoslavia. Hence beginning the
IMF-demanded constitutional changes to limit the powers of the republics over
federal decisions went in tandem with laying the groundwork for Greater Serbia
and the destruction of the real Yugoslav federation. Not surprisingly,
therefore, restoration of Kosovar autonomy was never one of the West’s demands
over the next decade.

Following the scrapping of Kosovar
autonomy and its complete occupation by the federal army, a state of apartheid
existed in Kosova throughout the 1990s. Albanians were expelled from all jobs
in public administration, all Albanian police were sacked and all municipal and
communal councils were suspended, making Kosova essentially a colony, with a
powerless population ruled by an administration made up entirely of people from
the small Serbian minority. Only Cyrillic script was allowed in official
dealings, thousands of teachers, who continued teaching in Albanian, were
sacked and school syllabuses were Serbianised. Half a million school age
children were thus effectively denied an education. The same happened with PrisitnaUniversity, and all names there
were changed to Cyrillic script. Hundreds of Albanian doctors were driven out
of hospitals. All Albanians in the public sector – which in the still largely
state-controlled economy of the time meant nearly everyone in formal employment
– were sacked. In the historic Trepca mines, Albanians, who had formed 70
per cent of the 23,000 strong workforce, all lost their jobs. Names of streets
and other locations throughout Kosova were changed to names from Serbian
nationalist mythology. For example, Pristina’s Marshall Tito Boulevarde was
changed to Vidovdan Boulevarde, after a Serbian Orthodox festival. Thousands of
Albanians were hauled before the courts on the most trivial of charges; a state
of complete lawlessness characterised the relations between the Serbian
occupation authorities and the mass of the population.

This led on to a deeper anti-Muslim
ideological crusade by the Serb nationalist movement. The cream of Serbia’s
writers and intellectuals, such as future prime minister Dobrica Cosic and Vuk
Draskovic, now head of the moderate Chetnik Serbian Renewal Party (SPO), pushed
obscurantist and medievalist Serbian-chauvinist and Muslim-hating views in their
writings. It was alleged that Tito merely “created” the Muslims as yet another
part of his devious project of “destroying the Serb nation” by setting up a
federation. The Muslims and Albanians were called “Turks” and presented as
continuers of the Ottoman Empire. The repression in Kosova and the
later genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims were presented
to the world as Serbia crusading in the
frontline of Western Christian civilisation against the “Islamic threat”.

Rise of the KLA

From 1992 onwards, the independence struggle
was led by Ibrahim Rugova and his Kosova Democratic League, which consisted
essentially of the former Kosovar branches of the Yugoslav League of
Communists. This entirely peaceful “Gandhian” struggle contrasted strongly with
the bloodshed engulfing the region. The centrepiece of the struggle was a
system of parallel schools, hospitals and other social and political
institutions, allowing Albanians to continue take part in normal life in some
form after being driven out of the system of the occupied province.

However, while gaining mass
participation by Albanians, this imposed the onerous burden of double taxation
– by the occupation regime, which gave them nothing in return, and by the
parallel authorities. From around 1996, Rugova’s strategy was more and more challenged
by more radical elements, particularly those led by Adem Demaci, known as
Kosova’s Nelson Mandela for spending a total of 28 years in Serbian prisons.
Demaci and others, including the growing student movement, demanded these
institutions be supplemented by a more active mass protest action approach.

This entire struggle of the 1990s is
a hugely inspirational story in itself, which this essay cannot detail.[27]
The ultimate failure of this decade of peaceful resistance to achieve any
gains, however, alongside the complete ignoring of this struggle by Western
powers, led to the rise of an armed guerrilla movement, the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA),
at the end of the 1990s. This will be dealt with in the next part, but the
important point here is to understand that this was not simply some “CIA-backed
creation of the Albanian mafia and drug-runners” as the right-wing (and some
left-wing) anti-Albanian demonisation asserts, but on the contrary was an
organic outgrowth of this already existing mass independence struggle. It is
hardly the first time in history that a non-violent liberation struggle turns
to armed resistance when all else fails and repression prevails.

The
other point to understand is that the demand for complete independence was not
an innovation of the KLA. Some like to imagine that the ``peaceful'' movement led
by Rugova had a similarly “moderate” aim, in the view of those who consider
independence sinful. As explained, Kosova’s declaration of independence by the
Rugova-led movement took place in 1990 and there has never been any movement
for autonomy or anything less than complete independence from any section of
Kosovar Albanian society at any point.

In
1996, the Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, carrying out research on
the views of various minorities within Serbia regarding solutions to
their oppression, was struck by the fact that the choice of “independence” as
the only solution was supported by 100 percent of Albanians.[28]
This is the simple reality that today’s critics of the right of the Kosovar
people to self-determination have to deal with.

Conclusion

This second article of the series has aimed to
demonstrate two things.

Firstly, the Kosovar Albanians were an oppressed people
in the former Yugoslavia, and much more so under the Serbian iron heel when
Yugoslavia collapsed. As an oppressed people living in a well-defined region,
they have the right to national self-determination, including complete independence.
Moreover, considering the historic imperialist partitioning of the Albanian
nation in 1913, and the fact that Albanians – the poorest nation in Europe –
still live in a compact, contiguous region covering five countries, the
Albanian people as a whole have the right to national self-determination, meaning, if
they wish, the Kosovars and other Albanian minorities should be allowed to
unite with Albania.

This is their right
– though whether a united Albanian nation or an independent Kosova is the
better outcome will be discussed below.

Secondly, the Kosovar Albanians have resisted Serbian
occupation for a century and have never recognised its legitimacy. This has to
be an important aspect of the alleged ``sovereignty” of established
international borders. They have never claimed anything less than complete
independence in all their struggles.

Therefore those claiming the current declaration of
independence is merely an imperialist maneuver are wrong – the independence
demand is and always has been overwhelming in Kosova, long before the very
belated imperialist acceptance of it. The role of imperialism in the current
crisis is very major, but cannot be understood in isolation from this very
fundamental underpinning.

The next article in the series will deal with the long-term imperialist
interest in and attitude to the Kosova question, including the war of 1999,
while the one after that will deal with how the current situation has come about and the
broader imperialist geo-=strategic interests involved. A particular aspect will
be the position of the Kosovar Serb minority in the newly independent state,
and the question of independent multi-ethnic Kosova versus that of partition
and/or united Albanian nation.

[5]Trotsky, L, “Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads,” July 22,
1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky
(1938-39).

[6]Quoted
from Malcolm, N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998, p.
254, from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the
International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan
Wars, Washington 1914, pp. 148-186.

[10]Turkish
statistics of 1911, quoted by The Institute of History, Pristina, “Expulsions
of Albanians and Colonisation of Kosova,” Pristina, www.kosova.com/expuls/. Indeed, the
Supreme Command of the Serbian III Army did a census with similar results on
March 3, 1913, ibid.

[11]Malcolm,
N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998.

[13] The main collaborationist forces were the Nazi-installed genocidal
Croatian Ustase, who killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and
others, the Serbian puppet regime of Nedic, ruling over Belgrade as the first
city to be declared ‘Judenfrei’ (free of Jews), and the Italian-backed and
later German backed Serbian Cetniks who killed most of the 100,000 Bosnian
Muslims who died in the war.

[14]Vickers, M, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of
Kosovo, ColumbiaUniversity Press, New York, 1998, p. 143.

[22].
These groups included the Movement for the National Liberation of Kosova, the
Group of Marxist-Leninists of Kosova, the
Red Front, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of Yugoslavia, and the Movement for an AlbanianRepublic in Yugoslavia.

[27] An excellent overall account of this struggle is Civil Resistance in Kosovo, by Howard
Clark, then coordinator of War Resisters’ International, Pluto Press, 2000.

[28]Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, Report on Human Rights in Serbia for 1996, Belgrade, 1997. In
the opinion of the Serbian Helsinki Committee, such unanimity was impossible,
hence declaring the result “invalid.” It also regarded to be invalid the fact
that 100 percent of Albanians gave a figure of ‘one’ out of ‘one to ten’ as to
how unequal they feel. The Helsinki Committee decided that such unanimity was
impossible “unless we want to conclude that … all Albanians in Serbia
feel totally unequal and oppressed and that all of them consider that the only
solution to their problem is an independent Kosovo.” In reality, the fact that
the Helsinki Committee even doubted that this was exactly the case only
indicates how far from the Kosovar reality even well-meaning Belgraders were at
the time.